4 p.m. Thursday, April 13, 2017
Undergraduate Learning Center, Room 106, UTEP Campus
Reception to follow presentation
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Lisa Napoli moved to southern California in 2004 to work on the public radio show, Marketplace. She was inspired to write this book when she learned of a sculpture of a nuclear mushroom that had been anonymously funded by the heiress to the McDonald’s fortune. Over the next five years, scouring archives, sleuthing out sources all over the country, and traveling to meet them, she unearthed and pieced together the story of this amazing woman. To tell Joan Kroc’s story, it seemed essential to tell that of Ray and how he made the McDonald’s fortune, too.
Lisa’s first book, Radio Shangri-La (Crown, 2011) chronicles the dawn of democratic rule in the mysterious Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, where she was invited to help start a youth-oriented radio station.
A journalist for over thirty years, she was among the pioneering team of journalists at the New York Times who covered the early days of the dot-com era. A graduate of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, Lisa leads a group of friends in an award-winning volunteer cooking group at the Downtown Women’s Center on Skid Row in Los Angeles.